Anna Daniels
The 2020 box office is currently paused, so let’s jump in the Wayback machine and look at the biggest failure of 2019, shall we? A new report reveals that the biggest box office bomb of 2019 was none other than X-Men: Dark Phoenix, the final nail in the coffin of Fox’s X-Men franchise. Yes, even Cats was a bigger “hit” than Dark Phoenix, and that’s saying something.
Deadline crunched the numbers, and it looks like Dark Phoenix is the biggest money loser of 2019. The publication took into account earnings from ticket sales, VOD and Blu-ray, and TV revenue to come up with its tallies, and the results for Dark Phoenix aren’t great, to say the least. According to their math, the final entry in Fox’s X-Men franchise lost a total of $133 million. It certainly didn’t help matters that Dark Phoenix received overwhelmingly negative reviews (it’s sitting at 23% on Rotten Tomatoes), and arrived at a time when audiences were clearly sick and tired of the confounding Fox X-Men movie franchise timeline.
One has to wonder how The New Mutants (which was previously a Fox-only release, but is now part of Disney due to the huge Fox-Disney merger) will fare, whenever the hell that comes out. Maybe Disney should start thinking about dropping that bad boy directly on Disney+. It’s already been delayed multiple times, which probably isn’t going to help its case should it eventually go to theaters.
Elsewhere in the world of 2019 box office bombs, Terminator: Dark Fate – which really wasn’t that bad! – ended up losing Paramount $122.6 million, which should probably signal the end for the Terminator franchise as a whole. Sexy fever dream Cats, about cat people who introduce themselves for a full two hours, ultimately lost Universal $113.6 million. Meow? More like me-ouch, am I right, kids?
Ang Lee’s big-budget action drama Gemini Man, in which Will Smith fought his younger self, also failed to draw a crowd, and lost Paramount $111.1 million. And finally, the animated Laika flick Missing Link lost $101.3 million, which is a shame, since everyone seems to like Laika. And what of 2020? What will be the biggest box office flop of this year? I guess that all depends on when the heck movie theaters reopen again.
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